Over the course of his career, he was surely aware of just how powerfully abolitionists, Black and white alike, were putting into print the great American hypocrisy of slavery. And yet, in Washington’s will, he freed just one person immediately on his death (William Lee), and more than 100 others only on his wife’s death. (The remaining majority of the people enslaved at Mount Vernon and his other properties came to him when he married, and their liberty would have been more legally complicated.)
Of the first five presidents, four were Virginians who between them enslaved thousands of people, and it is true Washington was the only one of those men to make even this gesture at manumission. (James Madison, the great constitutionalist, freed no one.) Yet other Virginia slaveholders acted with more alacrity and integrity; Washington wasn’t lacking models in this regard. More significantly, at the time of the first federal census in 1790, nearly 300,000 enslaved Virginians comprised almost 40% of the state’s total population. Because of his conviction that slavery was immoral, for example, Robert Carter III signed a will in 1791 that may have resulted in the largest manumission before the Civil War.
In short, we cannot see Washington’s work as a commander or as President without its relationship to slavery. Slavery was not an incidental factor in his life. It was part of all that he did and accomplished. His world was made by, and bound by, the centrality of slavery.
Generations of expert scholarship as well as critical public history—including at Mount Vernon—and journalism has shown us in devastating detail the depth, breadth, and centrality of slavery to the American experience. So why do heroic narratives of Washington ignore this?
Perhaps in times of crisis, drawing the contrast between heroes and villains seems necessary. We should know better. The 2024 campaign pitted the promise of a history-making first either way, the election of a woman of Black and South Asian descent—or a convicted felon, a one term-president who lost re-election and helped foment an insurrection in an attempt to stay in office. But in the effort to draw contrasts between them, and to find what is remarkable, unusual, or unprecedented, we do not need to excuse or elide slavery. Rather, in the spirit of our democratic ideals we need to contend straightforwardly with tyranny’s many faces across American history.